 Welcome to you all and to some of my colleagues from the Learning Center. Well, you know, people often ask me and I often see things in the news that ask questions about what's wrong with American science education. And here's a few headlines that say that such as US teams trail their peers around the world, why can't US students compete with the rest of the world, and so on. You may have had questions about science education too, but I'd like to get you to turn those questions around tonight and see that we'll turn them on their heads. Before I get going any further, I really want to thank Lindsay Barone who really helped me put this talk together and did a huge amount of the work. If you ask US adults and scientists in the American Association of Science, how they feel the US ranks in scientific achievements, then about half of the public says we're the best in the world in scientific achievements, and 92% of the scientists, so they feel pretty good about themselves. But Americans feel pretty good about American science too. As I said, more than half think we're the best in the world. And more than half also feel that we're the best in medical treatment and among the AAAS scientists, 64%. So the point of it is we feel pretty good as Americans and as people of science about the kind of work we do in science. But if you ask that same question about how Americans feel about K through 12 science, technology, engineering, and math education, so-called STEM, they don't feel so good. Only 29% of Americans think we're number one in the world in science and technology education and only 16% of the scientists. So clearly there's a perception that we're doing something wrong, both in the media and among the public and even among scientists. Well, so the question is how do we know that we're not doing so well in science education? What kind of things would we measure to answer that question? And who do we talk about when we do these sorts of studies? And that's what I want to spend the first part of the talk with you about. We're going to at least mention three studies. Two of them are by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science study. And they're studies that are done at the fourth and the eighth grade levels. You know, there's various things and it tells you some of the kinds of questions, the number of questions they ask about life science, physical science, earth science, about the types of questions they ask students. It's a test that's meant to see what students know about science and a little bit about science thinking. What you'll notice is that not all the kids in the United States take it, but just from these eight or 10 states here. And then around the world, a total of about 4,000 students participate but from these countries around the world. It's been done for a while. Most people think it's a pretty good study, but the thing I want you to know is that that whole idea that we're not doing well in science education as far as I can tell comes from this test and from the next test I'm going to show you. There's really no other ways that we compare kids in science around the world. So this is it. And so here's the ranking of all the countries who did the fourth grade test and the eighth grade test. You can't really read it, but what you need to know is that in the fourth grade, the United States ranks seven out of 50 countries. Really not so bad. And in the eighth grade we drop a little bit to tenth out of 42 countries. So you could say the 25th percentile roughly. So that's the way we stack up and these tests have been done for a number of years, but that's the way we stack up in the fourth and the eighth grade. Really not badly. Now there's another whole assessment that is done for 15-year-old kids, which would be high school, about middle high school kids. It also has about 4,000 kids per country. Again, not all of the U.S. is represented, just three states, and then all of these countries around the world. And in this study, the so-called PISA study, because the program for international student assessment, again it's this list of countries, and here's what seems to really bother people a lot, which is we're 28th out of 65 countries in that ranking. So if you take those three tests together at the fourth, the eighth, and at age 15, we go from position number 7 to number 10 to 28. So as far as I can tell, those are three data points that people use to say that we're not doing very well in science education, and I think most people focus on this 15-year-old data, the data set from 15-year-old students. Well, I'd like us to think a bit about these tests. Tests are never perfect, and especially international ones or standardized sorts of tests always have problems. So I'd like to just go through them a little bit and deconvolute the scores a little bit and tell you why first off those scores don't necessarily bother me a lot. But then we'll go on and turn them on their heads. So again, here's a summary of the U.S. positions on the three tests, fourth grade, eighth grade, and at age 15. And here's two of the top-scoring countries, Singapore, which you can see ranks in the one, two, or three positions on all three of these tests, and the highest ranking of the European countries, which is Finland, which also scores very highly. So we're going to, in the next few minutes, compare the United States versus these two countries. Now, you can say why might that not be comparing apples to apples in these countries, and one thing that might come to mind is the size of these countries. So this is Singapore, and it's about the size, it's a fourth the size of Rhode Island. It's about eight miles by 20 miles. It's about half the size of Long Island, or actually about a fifth the size of Long Island. It's pretty small. This is Finland. I never knew how big it is, but it's pretty much the size of Montana. So those number of U.S. states are being compared against these rather small countries. Now, let's also look at the gross domestic product per capita. In other words, basically how much money is made per person in the country. I don't know if you knew it, but Singapore ranks very high in the world and ranks well ahead of the United States overall. Singapore also ranks ahead in the per capita gross domestic product of all of the states in blue that are included in these three studies that I showed you. And you can see that Finland ranks down there about the same as Florida or Alabama. So there you might see something about Singapore, which is they've got a lot of money to spend on a lot of different things. Now, if you look at the per pupil spending, Finland as a percentage of the gross domestic product, all the work of the country, Finland comes out ahead with the highest percentage of spending per pupil. The U.S. is in the middle, and Singapore is the lowest, but remember Singapore's got a very high gross domestic product, and if you sort of adjust for it, then in fact the spending per pupil in real dollars is actually more than the United States. So the point I want to give you here is that these countries spend more per pupil of their gross domestic product on education than the U.S., which might be surprising to you. Now let's take a look at the makeup of these countries. This is the ethnic makeup of Finland, all the states involved in the study, and we're Singapore for there. And these denote the blue is the minority ethnic group, and then smaller subpopulations are here, or ethnic minorities. And if you look at this, what you'll see is that Finland has a really homogeneous society, as you'll know if you've ever been anywhere in Scandinavia, very low percentage of ethnic minorities. Singapore has about 25% ethnic minorities, which are mainly Indian and Malay, and you'll see that the U.S. as a whole has about 37% ethnic minorities, and then you can look at the different states that are in the TIMS and the PISA study. So the point I want to make here is that the U.S. population is way more heterogeneous, way more diverse than either of the other two populations in the TIMS study. What difference does that make? Let's just take a quick look at that. In Singapore, it's known that the Malay population is behind an academic achievement, behind the other two population groups, which are ethnic Chinese and Indian. Finland doesn't have much in the way of ethnic groups, but the one that is lagging behind the other are the Roma Gypsies, and in the United States, there's an achievement gap in school and also in science between whites and Asians and black Hispanics and Native Americans. And this shows up in the scores of the PISA study, that one that's taken at the age of 15. These are the U.S. numbers for 2012, and what you'll see is that the average score for whites and Asians are above 500 or more, and the scores for blacks and Hispanics are in the 400s. So the point of it is that our scores in the United States are skewed by these relatively large numbers of ethnic minorities who we know struggle in science, and it's a nationwide problem that many people are trying to work on. And so here we can then put that into perspective. There's a tenth of a percent of the known struggling minority in Finland that is affecting their scores. There's about 13% of the melee minority that depresses the scores in Singapore, and in the U.S., the two biggest groups are Hispanics and blacks, who we know lag behind in science achievement. So let's take a look at another thing that the scores say or don't say, and that's the context, the educational context, that these tests take place within. It's really pretty interesting, and what's the philosophy of testing in these countries? First off, these are the number of school districts in each of the states that participate in the TIMS and the PISA studies, and you'll see that there's a lot of individual school districts within California and the other states. It's well over 2,000. In Finland, there's 317 states or actually their education authorities, and in Singapore, there's one. Now what that's telling you is that in a place like Singapore or Finland, there's less local control and more control by the central government, especially in Singapore, and you could imagine that a centralized education authority would be a lot better at doing things like standardized tests and preparing kids for tests than in a very disparate sort of school systems like we have here in all of the United States that participate in the studies. Now if you want to take a look at what the Singapore school system looks like, and I spent quite a lot of time in Singapore some years ago, so I saw this firsthand. I expect you to memorize this chart, but here's the kids in primary school. At the end of the sixth grade, there's an extremely high-stakes test, and that's going to set your course for a lot of your life. If you're really school smart, you're actually put in this group called the Express, and what that means is you're slated to go to university from the sixth grade on, and you've got a pretty clear path as long as you don't mess up. Now if you're not one of the Express students, you're going to work your way through this system. First off, this sixth grade test is going to determine which of these sub-tracks you're put on. And my understanding from people I met and talked to in Singapore over a number of years is that once you get on one of these tracks, it's pretty difficult to change horses in the middle of the stream, so to speak. You wind your way through these tracks, and then there's another big test here at the end of 10th grade, which is then going to determine finally whether you go into some kind of vocational job, a sort of vocational technical education, or if you make it back up here with the Express people to the full-on academic preparation. Those are extremely high-stakes tests, and they're there for one reason. It's like when in the sorting hat, it's going to determine which house you go to live in, and it's going to sort out your life pretty much for the rest of your life. So these tests are literally for sorting kids onto academic and vocational tracks. And I think they're going to come in here. Here's when the first TIMS test takes place. I guess they're probably pretty happy there. But these other two tests take just after this really difficult test to determine secondary education and just before this test that's going to determine your adult life for good. So these kids are very good at taking tests. They know the stakes of tests, and it's ingrained in their society and administered by one ministry of education. And remember, Singapore is basically the size and the population of Chicago if the Rhode Island didn't hit you. Now Finland is really a lot more like us, which is they have compulsory education up through high school, and then there's a leaving exam, a national leaving exam at the end of the 12th grade, and then that's going to help determine where your college placement. It's pretty much like an SAT, but it's administered by the government. So I would say they're more on the order of our kind of education system than not like Singapore. And what's our education system like? Well, we had this thing called No Child Left Behind, which was not refunded by Congress in the last session, which was loved by some people, but hated by a lot of people. Educators called it No Child Left Untested. But the purpose of No Child Left Behind and the thing that has now succeeded it, which is every student succeeds, which I didn't even know, I confess, are not for sorting kids like in Singapore. They're meant to diagnose the school system and the teachers and to make improvements, especially in struggling school districts. Now, yes, they do give you some idea of how your kid's doing versus other kids, but there's no stakes for the kids. It doesn't really determine anything in most school districts about what kind of classes you take or where you would be mandatorily placed. There's still freedom for the students to move around pretty much in spite of whatever score they might get on the kinds of tests they take and No Child Left Behind. Our tests also focus mainly on English and math, which are thought to be the subjects for general literacy and general helping you move ahead in the school system. So what I want to say here is if you compare yourself especially to Singapore, these school systems and the purpose of testing in those systems are diametrically opposed. One is to sort kids out into academic and vocational screens, streams, and the other is basically to diagnose the school system and the teachers and to see where they can do better in helping student achievement. And of course, we have plenty of places in the U.S. that just opted out of all of this because they feel their school districts are doing fine without having the federal government medal in their local control of the school district. That happened quite a lot here on Long Island and also in Connecticut. Okay, well, here's my beginning to ask you a bunch of other questions. We've dealt with what's wrong with American science education. Hopefully you see why I have some questions about that. But here's the first of the questions that put this totally on its end, which is if our school system is so bad, why does everybody want to come here for college? And if you think I'm kidding, here you go. These are doctorates in the United States in 1984, 1994, 2004, and 2014. And the blue here are U.S. citizens and the yellow parts here are people who are here on visas or some kind of permit. And this is all PhDs and the second bar is science PhDs. So take a look at either one, but let's look at science. You'll see that 30 years ago, about 24% of the science doctorates were to foreigners and now that number is 38%. For all around PhDs, it's gone up a bit, too, from 16% to 29%. But the point of it is people like to come here for university. And then the people who like to come here the most are actually from some of the countries that do the best on the TIMS and the PISA studies, those international science assessments. So what you'll see overwhelmingly, over the last 10 years, people getting doctorates in the U.S. of foreign citizenship, they're overwhelmingly from China and another top country is Taiwan. And I'll have you note that in the PISA study, the city of Shanghai rated number one. So some of those students are some of these students next year. So I don't know what that means, but it means there's something about the U.S. education system somewhere that people like. Now maybe they wouldn't come here for high school, but in fact there's a big movement among Chinese students to go to school districts in California especially. But people like to come here for college education. Okay, let's shift away from the testing now. I've showed you these data that show that the U.S. doesn't do so well in achievement, science achievement at the pre-college level. And the question is, does that really matter? Does that really say anything about how we're doing in science? Remember the first slide I showed you is that everybody really feels pretty good about what we're doing in science and medicine. But did the scores on these international assessments have anything to do with that? And the answer is I don't think so. Here's Nobel Prizes over the last 115 years. And what you'll see is in medicine, chemistry and physics, about half of all the Nobel Prizes awarded in that period of time went to people who were affiliated with U.S. institutions. So half of all the Nobel Prizes. How about patents? These are patents awarded. All the blue ones are from the U.S. and all the blue ones are foreign ones. And here in 2014, that number is a little less than 50%. So about half of all the Nobel Prizes awarded to people working in U.S. institutions, about half of the patents to U.S. nationals. How about citations in some of the major scientific journals in the world? And those of you from science know that these are very important general science journals here, medical journals here, and another general science. And what you'll see is the U.S. authors who publish in these journals range from about 30%, sorry, from 16% to 48%, depending on the journal. If you look at the citations, in other words, how many times a paper is cited or mentioned by another person, and then you map them on sort of a web. So if you imagine a telephone web or a web of all the people who are interacting with you on Facebook, and some people have a lot of connections and some people don't have any. Well, this is sort of a connection map of citations of scientific articles around the world with the country sized according to its citations. And what you'll see is the citations in the U.S. are about equal to all of the citations of Europe and about twice the citations of Asia. So it doesn't appear that however we perform on these international assessments at pre-college science education, they don't seem to be affecting us much in our performance of science, at least by those several ways I showed you. So let's now shift to the end of the talk and let's talk about what's right about science education. Well, it's local and it's phenomenological, and let me tell you what I mean by that. There's 13,000 school authorities in the United States, and Long Island is a great example of local control because here on Long Island, virtually every school district in Nassau and Suffolk County is about one or maybe two high schools, several middle or junior high schools, and several elementary schools, and you control them. Now, yes, New York State, we have a New York State curriculum, yes, there's certain things that come from no child left behind from the federal government, but your local school boards have the authority to set curriculum in each one of those districts, and that's the case to some greater or lesser extent and mostly greater in all of these 13,000 school districts in the United States. Now, some people would say that local control and the lack of central authority means that we do things over and over again and quote, recreate the wheel. But I'm actually of the mind that that's probably one of the things that's special about American education, which is every school district has the ability to innovate or not, move ahead or not. And the best school districts in the United States, in fact, innovate and move ahead, and of course some suffer because they can't, and some of that, of course, is monetary. So I think this is actually a good thing, the local control of school systems and the local control also, of course, of the university system. How about a local example? Psyosat High School. It's a modest-sized school district by most means. It's sort of even modest by Long Island size, about 2,000 students, high number of kids attending college. And the thing I want you to realize is that they have about 25 different courses that are offered at Psyosat High School that you could take. So feel free to take virtually any of them so long as you meet some minimum other requirements of the region's curriculum. And if you actually look at a chart of the things, you don't need to look at this very much. These are a couple different tracks that kids can take. But what I want you to see here is that as a student progresses from eighth grade through twelfth grade, their choices in science increase. So in other words, as a kid goes through science, they have some basic things that they have to take. And then, you know, for those kids interested in science, there's an awful lot of things available. I can tell you at my high school, Ward-Mellville, it's probably twice the number of science courses. But this is 25 just in a relatively small school district like Psyosat. Well, compare that with the same sort of chart from Singapore. And I actually wrote to some of my friends in Singapore and got their charts. These are real ones. And what's interesting is that at the seventh and eighth grade, they have a little bit of choice. And that choice actually gets less and less as they go through the school system. And if you compare these, you see these kids being increasingly channeled with very little choice as they get more and more mature. And here in the United States, you have kids as they become more mature having more choices. I think that actually is telling you something about the philosophy of the school systems. Now, what does this all mean? Because remember, the only way that I ever was able to compare the students that we see here on Long Island and international students were these three tests that I started out talking to you about. But I actually had a way to test some kids in a more direct way, and we've been doing that now for two years. It's not a lot of kids. And as you know, you know, low numbers sometimes can be misleading. But we've had students coming to the DNA Learning Center from Beijing 166 High School. I should have had some photos in here for you. But it's a high school in central Beijing. It's in the old part of Beijing. It's about a half a mile from the Forbidden City, about a half a mile from Tiananmen Square. Most of the students that go there, their parents are public servants doing something in the Chinese national government or in the Beijing city government. So it's quite a good school. And it was designated as a special school of biology. Now I wouldn't want to say that it's anywhere near as say Stuyvesant High School in New York City or the Bronx High School of Science or Brooklyn Technical High School in New York. I don't think it's in that league. But it's trying to be the designated biology high school in Beijing, which is a city of, you tell me, 15 million people or so. Well, the students who come here, when they come here we give them a general test of literacy items about genetics because that's what we're interested in. We didn't make up these questions. So in other words, these questions are not biased by things that I might think are important or what we have at the Learning Center. We took them from a set of validated questions developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And the questions that are used by quite a lot of people who might be interested in looking at genetic literacy, like I could give the test to you and it'd be a pretty good one. The tests are in Chinese, so there's not a language issue as far as we know. And those kids from Beijing 166, very good urban up-to-date cosmopolitan school. When we give them this test, their average score on this test is 55%. Don't worry about 55, don't think of it like a failing grade, but it's just a percent. They get 55% of the questions right. And they're high school kids and they're coming to take one of the DNA Learning Center's courses. The Long Island kids coming to take that same course score 25 percentage points higher on those tests. And this has held up over several years because I wasn't sure if this effect, when I first saw it, I actually couldn't believe it, but it's held up over a number of years and this has actually pooled data. So what does this say to me? It says to me, that's great all of the standardized testing that's done in Asia in different parts of the world, but at least in our corner of the world, which is genetics, these kids from very good high school in Beijing are not as well prepared as the kids here on Long Island. Now, the reasons why they're not as well prepared in genetics, some of them have to do with the fact that kids here on Long Island could come to the DNA Learning Center before this time. But a lot of it has to do with that ability of those kids to progressively choose more and more science courses as they can at SCIOSED and also of having more opportunities of visiting science-oriented museums, science centers, and shows about science on TV. So it's a whole syndrome of things available to those kids on Long Island that we're comparing that makes their science world really much more rich than for those students in Beijing. And it shows up here, but it doesn't show up on the TIMS or the piece of studies. Well, the last thing I want to talk about is my idea that... not my idea, but the idea that education is phenomenological, meaning that the real education occurs at the point and that interaction between a student and the teacher, but also phenomenological, meaning that in a system of local control, the local school board and the local people can say, these things are relatively more important to us in shaping the experience of students than these things that you might say to us from Washington, D.C. or Beijing. Phenomenology focuses on an individual's firsthand experiences rather than the abstract experience of others. And I've got to tell you, all of the standardized tests, they deal entirely with abstract experience. Now, about 15 years ago, there was an educator by the name of Howard Gardner who came up with the idea of multiple intelligences, which basically he said that people have eight different ways of learning. Some of them are kinesthetic, like when you touch things and move things around. Some of them are logical, some of them are linguistic, and there's a whole list of eight different what he called intelligences. And his point was this, if we all had exactly the same kind of mind and there was only one kind of intelligence, then we could teach everybody the same thing in the same way and assess them in the same way, and that would be fair. But once we realize that people have very different kinds of minds, they have different strengths. Some people are good at thinking spatially, some in thinking language, others are very logical, other people need to be hands-on and explore actively and try things out. Then education, which treats everybody the same way, is actually the most unfair education because it picks out one kind of mind, which I call the professor mind, somebody who is very linguistic and logical and says, if you think like that, great. If you think like that, there's no room to train you. Standardized tests only tap the professor mind, absolutely in 100%, maybe a little bit of the linguistic mind. So if you have a country that strives to do very, very, very, very well on standardized tests and Singapore is one, you can't possibly do right by all of the rest of the intelligences and however scattered and however repetitive or redundant the school systems are in the United States, at least many of them are striving to help kids learn in those other ways. That's not to say that in Singapore they don't do that at all. But I'm just saying the heavy bent on these high stakes tests for funneling and tracking kids where they go in education are mainly tapping into one kind of mind and they produce students and I know a lot of Singaporean students, very capable students and a very large number of very capable students but the Singaporeans will tell you themselves that that kind of education blunts the highly creative people that are sort of out of the middle. And this is the reports that you also get in science of Singaporean and some Asian students which is and even some European students that that kind of regimented education is not that good for creativity. So the final passage I want to explore with you is okay well based upon what people who are interested in science education in the United States, what are they thinking about these days? Let me just tell you a little bit. In the last ten years there's been these five studies. They're pretty much like most studies which is they get a big or a small group of people in a room, they're supposed to be experts and they thrash around what's important and what's not important and then they come up with some kind of a consensus in these documents. These documents all say the same thing. You don't need to read them. I'll tell you what they all say which is how do you reform science education? These happen to focus on undergraduate education because remember even though everybody wants to come to our undergraduate universities they actually probably do a worse job at science education than the pre-college element which seems to be so bad. That's what I'm here to tell you. Because that professorial sort of alerting is even more entrenched in the collegiate system than it is in the pre-college system. In other words there's more focus on that sort of one type of intelligence in the university in some cases than at the pre-college level. So what do all these documents say? You should try to get kids to think conceptually at a higher level and to think about how science really works, the practice of science rather than memorizing stuff like facts and terms. Now everybody knows that but that's key. You have to actually believe that. You can't just say that stuff and then give people a lot of standardized tests. It's antithetical. You need to adopt ways that kids can ask questions, inquire and work from themselves outward like I said in that phenomenological way. They have to be student centered. And kids especially have to be able to ask their own questions. We find that's extremely important. You can't ask the questions for the kids. You need to help them work between disciplines and biology is a great example of a science that has a lot of different things going on. It has math, it has computers, it has chemistry, it has a little bit of physics and it has biology, it has a lot of stuff. So that's a good example of interdisciplinary study. And you have to work collaboratively. The idea that a scientist goes into some lab by themselves and does great stuff and comes out and then discovers stuff, that does happen sometimes. But today if you read papers in journals, there's long, long lists of scientists on one paper. Sometimes the list is so long that they can't even put it at the front of the article. They have to put it like as a footnote. So people are working collaboratively, especially on things that involve computers and big sets of data and so forth. Research experience that kids can have, let them do these science practices, try stuff over again. It doesn't work and they have to try it again. That's reiteration. And they have to discuss their results. They have to be like scientists. They have to be like when scientists come into this room and argue that, hey, I did these experiments. I think they're valid and this is what I think they say. And you can say to me, I tried some similar ones. I don't think you're interpreting them right. So let's go back and try them again. That's what happens in this room. But kids have to learn that as a part of science, not to sit there and figure out what answer they give on a standardized test. And the sort of holy grail in undergraduate biology education at this moment is to take these ideas and to develop experiments that you can scale up. Because traditionally a few kids have been invited into the labs of professors when they were, say, juniors or seniors. I was. And you can work on some project and that would be helpful. But it tended to be later in your school career, like when you were a junior and senior, and it was only a few kids. But now what we're trying to figure out is how can we scale up a research experience. Maybe not as intense and maybe not as mentored exactly by one professor as that one-on-one. But how can we scale up something that's very close to research that could evolve a whole class of kids at the same time. And that's called course-based research experiences. And it literally is the holy grail. Every competent, striving university in the United States is implementing them and implementing them early. Because all of the data say you need to get these experiences in for kids when they're freshmen and sophomores. If you don't capture them, then they walk out. So one of those studies there, this ugly one here, was by the President's Councils of Advisors in Science and Technology. They call it PCAST. And what they said, I don't know exactly why they said this, but they said we need a million new workers in science, technology, engineering, and math over the next decade. And they said if you can increase the number of kids who stay in a science track. In other words, they come in as freshmen and say, hey, I want to be a scientist. If you can increase by 10% the number of kids that actually stay and graduate with a degree in science or technology. If you could increase that number by 10%, that would give you 750,000 kids over 10 years. In other words, 70,000 to 5,000 kids per year. That's called retention. When kids actually stay in the field of study that they said they were going to do. And that's about the only thing that you can really measure in undergraduate education. So one thing you might get from this talk, and I hope you do, which is there's relatively few things that you can really measure very well in education. That's why we take these really poor and uninformative studies between countries because it's very difficult to measure these things. But one thing you can measure is the kid that comes in and says, I'm measuring in biology when they're freshmen. And you can see when they get out of the university four or five years later, they don't count them if the kids that, you know, take some seven years to get a degree. But four or five years, are they still a biology major or at least still a science major? Or do they switch over to economics or business? It's very easy to measure. And here's what I want to, the last part of this part is the University of Texas at Austin has one of the oldest course-based research programs. Not very old, it's only about seven or eight years old. 800 students per year, they're gearing up to have the possibility that any freshman in all of the University of Texas at Austin could have a research experience with a professor in the first year. And what do they find? They find that kids who go have that freshman research experience, 12% greater retention in the sciences than kids who don't have it. And they're all matched for economics, for socioeconomics, for race, they're matched perfectly because this was a re-study. So what does that say? If a kid has a research experience in their freshman or sophomore year, you do exactly what this President's Council asked us to do, which is get at least 10% more retention of kids in science. And then imagine if you take that research experience back to the high school. You might have another 10%. That could give you 20% more kids interested in science just by having research experiences once in high school and once when they're in college. And I'm happy to say that the New York State Legislature is on the ball. They mandated that every student who graduates from the CUNY to the University of New York or the SUNY system, State University of New York, every student has to have an experiential science learning element to their graduation as a requirement. And they list some of the things that could be service learning activities, internships, and the part that I really like, undergraduate projects. And the very last thing I want to leave you with is just a couple of examples of the things that we do at the DNA Learning Center that's in line with what these Consensus Studies have said. Because we've been interested in experiential discovery learning, kind of learning where kids ask questions, whether they're their own questions or are guided by the teacher. We've been interested in this for a long time. So here's just a couple of the things we've done over the last 20 years. I didn't go back any further than that. So in 1995, we did the first experiment anywhere in the world where kids could get some DNA out of some cheek cells. It's simple and easy and doesn't hurt. And they could look at a bit of their DNA and use that to compare their DNA with people from around the world. And that means diversity. How are we diverse genetically? And we've been doing that experiment since 1995 and it's one that's done all around the country and to some extent around the world. Next, we came along and did an experiment in 1997, which was the first experiment anywhere that I'm aware of that allowed students to look at a bit of their own DNA sequence, the AT's, season G's that make up our genetic code. And again, they look at that bit of sequence, it goes into a database, and then they can compare their DNA with their friends, which is interesting, but also compare their DNA with people from around the world, including ancient specimens like Atsi the Iceman, whose replica is at the DNA Learning Center, or Neanderthals who were our cousins and we mixed it up with a long time ago. So that's fun. And just to give you an idea of what you can do if you do something like this and stick with it and, you know, our fastidious as we try to be, over 100,000 students have their DNA in our database, and this was long before you could do Family Tree DNA, or 23andMe, or the Geneographic Project. We were doing a similar sort of thing for free here at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. And 1.6 million people have gone on to that website and analyzed their own DNA or somebody else's DNA. Then we came along and worked with these little tiny worms called C. elegans, and this was a set of experiments that are very good for the college level, which can let students sort of knock out a gene, make it stop working for a while, and then try to study what effect that has on the worm. And it turns out that this worm is a teeny thing, but it has most of the same genes as us. So you could, for example, think about a gene that's involved in cancer or one that might be involved in a disease that's in your family, say, and a student could look that gene up, find the similar gene in this worm, and knock it out and see what does it do to the worm. It may do something, it may do nothing. So this is the kind of project that the kids can start with their own question, like, you know, I have chronic fatigue syndrome in my family. Do we know anything about those genes? And if I knock out one of those genes in this worm, you know, does it look tired? Well, that sounds funny, but that's a pretty good question, actually. This is a super fun experiment that actually was first done here at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the 1930s where they determined whether you can taste some certain bitter things. And all of you have probably done this experiment. We take a little piece of paper and you put it in your mouth, and some people go, oh, God, that is so bitter. And some people say, I can't taste it. Well, it's determined by gene, that ability to taste that. And now we let kids look at that gene, determine what their gene looks like, and then predict whether or not they can taste the bitter taste. Well, that's exactly what you do if you have certain kinds of cancers and they take a look at your genes and they say, well, judging by the look of your genes, this specific treatment would be best for you, and this one would be virtually useless. That's called precision or personalized medicine. In this experiment, let's kids understand that. Another thing that we've done is to go into cyber infrastructure, which means the computer stuff, the big computers and the track ways and the internet that allow people to analyze things in biology. We've been working on a big $100 million project to do education, part of the education for $100 million project to help scientists and teachers learn computer resources like super fast computers and computers in the clouds and things like that. And the last two things that we've done which are super fun is DNA bar coding, which we started a few years ago, which let kids go out into the environment or out into the grocery stores, find something that's alive or once was alive. My favorite is bird's nest, use the bird's nest soup and you can actually buy that bird nest and say, is that really a bird nest? Is that really made by birders? It's just like some stuff because who would know? But you can actually extract the DNA out of that bird nest and show that there's DNA in that bird nest that comes from the proper swift in Asia that makes that nest and builds it with its saliva and in making it deposit some of its DNA there. But you can also go out into Cold Spring Harbor as we're doing and survey all the small organisms that might be difficult for you to figure out what they are. But by the DNA bar code, you can tell pretty easily what they are. Are they the same species that were there a hundred years ago when Charles Davenport first came here and had people study in the environment? Well, the answer is we're finding out that some of those things are gone and some of them have been replaced by other organisms and where did most of those organisms come from? They came in on the bottoms of boats from Europe and other places. And the final thing that we've just started a couple years ago, this is a very ambitious project, probably really and truly I think the most ambitious large-scale education project you'll find anywhere, which is the project that helps faculty at smaller colleges and universities have an organism that they're interested in and then through this project and through the funding that we have, we allow them to get a whole set of DNA information on that organism. When I say a whole set of DNA information, I mean a picture of all of the genes that are working inside of that organism under one condition or another. And it's literally billions and billions, tens of billions of DNA letters worth of information that then have to be analyzed using high-performance computers of the sort I mentioned to you before. So you can see that I'm not down on U.S. science education. I actually think we're headed in the right kinds of directions. I'm happy that Colesery Harbor Laboratory and the DNA Learning Center have been involved in that effort to try to move it along. And I thought I'd leave you with just something totally different, which is another question, which is we've got this great science education system that's getting better all the time. We've got this great research system that does half of the Nobel Prizes, half of the citations, half of the patents in the world. So how do you keep that going? And so the question I wanted to put to you is what do you think it takes to become an independent researcher? Meaning what do you have to do to get there? And the answer is 42 years. So the average age of someone who's getting their first grant that's called an R01, that's an independent investigator grant. It's the sign that you've made it as a researcher. The average age of the granting of those is now 42 years old. Now imagine a career that you might choose where you're going to, of course, go to university. You're, of course, going to have to do something, rather, some kind of apprenticeship or graduate score or this or that. But imagine going through that until you're 42 years old to say, yeah, I'm finally in my career. And that's the reason why that is so is because despite the fact that we love our science and we love our medicine here in the United States, and we think we're pretty good at funding it, there's still not enough money to go around for the best people to do the best work. So you have to sort of get in that queue and wait until you're 42 years of age. And as a consequence, we're losing many, many American researchers. And who are we losing it to? Those foreigners who come in and would love to go to college here. So anyway, I don't know what all of that means, but to me it's an interesting story and I hope you think about some of those questions. I also think that when you see questions in the media about science or education, that you maybe take some time to look at the answers behind those questions. So thank you all for coming and have a great night.